Managing contact list is one of the challenges of today that spans across the users of basic voice communication, SMS, email, social networking portals etc. . . . A new tool recently developed at Stanford University attempts to address this problem by automatically working out a person's different and overlapping friendship groups by analyzing the history of their Facebook and Gmail account. The tool—called SocialFlows—can work from the images a person was tagged in over the last two years, and from the pattern of e-mail recipients recorded in the last two years via a Gmail account. Once Socialflows has processed the necessary data, it suggests different groups of contacts or friends, some overlapping. Referring to FIG. 1 (PRIOR ART), there is a diagram which illustrates the basic concept of the SocialFlows tool where images tagged over last two years 100 and email recipients over last two years 102 are used to identify patterns 104, show overlaps 106, suggest contact groups 108, allow a user to edit 110, and store contact groups in Facebook or Gmail 112.
The SocialFlows tool does do a good job of taming the complexities of creating contact lists of different types of friends by analyzing the user's communication history associated with their Facebook and Gmail accounts. However, there is still a desire to improve on how contact lists can be created by analyzing the user's communication history from multiple communication applications. Furthermore, the SocialFlows tool does not control how to the user can communicate and send their message to the people in these contact lists, which can be much more complex when compared to the process of creating the contact lists of different types of friends. Hence, there is a desire to improve not only how contact lists can be created but also control how a user can communicate and send their message to the people in these contact lists.